week 11

WHAT:

3.1  Offers a careful interpretation & analysis of children’s early literacy/numeracy skills & interests  .

During the workshop discussion we were asked to search big literacy and numeracy concepts in young children and how they form and their learning continuum. My colleagues and found a list of them including, phonology, receptive language, listening, gestures, symbols, drawing, spatial awareness, pragmatic skills, sequencing, turn taking, non- verbal communication, subject knowledge. Therefore I wanted to learn more about them and found these two articles.

MAIN ARGUMENT:

According to (Storch & Whitehurst, 2002) Research has demonstrated that a range of skills developed by the preliterate child lays the foundation for later reading and writing ability. They have defined emergent literacy as the skills, knowledge, and attitudes that are developmental precursors to reading and writing as well as the environments that support these development for example shared book reading.

They state that the concept of emergent literacy implies a continuum between pre reading and reading, in which literacy-related behaviors and activities taking place during the preschool period are essential aspects of the course of literacy development. The code-related skill base of emergent literacy includes the conventions of print e.g., knowing that writing goes from left to right and top to bottom across a page, beginning forms of writing e.g., writing one's name, knowledge of graphemes like naming letters of the alphabet and grapheme-phoneme correspondence e.g., that the letter b makes the /b/ sound, and phonological awareness e.g., that the word bat begins with the /b/ sound. 

In addition to code-related skills, a variety of oral language skills during the preschool period have been shown to contribute to a child's reading ability, including semantic,  their word knowledge, expressive and receptive vocabulary, syntactic knowledge of word order and grammatical rules, and conceptual knowledge as well as narrative discourse the ability to construct an original story a understand the role of these code-related and oral language skills as precursors to eventual literacy, it is important to consider the reading process and the development of reading ability. Reading requires the coordination and interaction of multiple skills, including recognition of individual letters, translation of letters into sounds, determination of the meaning of a word, and interpretation and understanding Findings from the model hold powerful implications for children from low-income backgrounds. They have  also stated that a  number of studies have documented social class differences in children's exposure to the particular literacy experiences shown to be important for the development of language and emergent literacy skills.

 The other reading on numeracy was by (Hannula, Räsänen & Lehtinen, 2007) and they explored how children differ in how much they spontaneously pay attention to quantitative aspects of their natural environment. They found that how this spontaneous tendency to focus on numeracy (SFON) is related to subitizing-based enumeration and verbal and object counting skills. In this exploratory study, children were tested individually at the age of 4–5 years on these skills. According to this article the three early numerical skills that develop during childhood. The first of these skills is subitizing-based number recognition  like the rapid and accurate number recognition of 1–4 objects without counting, a skill which  some believe builds on a non verbal pre attentional representational ability to individuate small sets of items . This ability has been suggested to be one of the significant elements for grasping the cardinal meanings of the first counting words. The second essential enumeration skill is verbally based object counting. It takes children a long time to reach meaningful object counting skills after they learn their first number word.

NOW WHAT:

 These two articles have provided a very useful and meaning full insight into how children develop their literacy and numeracy concepts and as a teacher we should provide children with more opportunities to engage and develop their concepts around literacy and numeracy, and I have also come to learn that children learn literacy and numeracy concepts in different ways and that  while teaching them these concepts the teacher should keep they should be age appropriate.

REFERENCES:

1: Storch, S. A., & Whitehurst, G. J. (2002). Oral language and code-related precursors to reading: evidence from a longitudinal structural model. Developmental psychology, 38(6), 934.

2: Hannula, M. M., Räsänen, P., & Lehtinen, E. (2007). Development of counting skills: Role of spontaneous focusing on numerosity and subitizing-based enumeration. Mathematical thinking and learning, 9(1), 51-57.